It’s sad to see Kodak, an icon of my generation, go belly-up.

Kodak isn’t alone in trying to sort out this analog to digital transition. The company’s passion for image making seems inexorably rooted in the physical creation of images, rather than the passion for sharing visual storytelling that could have been its future.

Consigned to history

This isn’t about smug digital evangelism or Facebook eating everyone’s lunch. It’s about failing to match channels with user motivations. (Google Wave, as we may recall, took a different tack to the same fate: tossing new features together without due regard for what drives people to adopt them.)

The irony is Kodak did get a headstart with the acquisition of Ofoto,  but

…seemed to want to drive digital behaviour back to businesses it knew and could control. Rather than embrace digital, it wanted digital to fuel printing.

I hope other long-established businesses are listening.

My first agency job was in media. Since media reps are in the business of selling eyeballs, our standard suite of questions for evaluating (magazine) titles included: are circulation figures audited?

Years later, we have some form of digital-enabled accountability. But this can be tenuous, misleading and, as in the case below, a perversion of economics.

The Loffles model guarantees two things: one, the number of people who will view your ad (as opposed to traditional pie-in-the-sky assumptions). Two, that these people are viewing your ad for the wrong reasons and in the wrong context, and almost definitely will not convert to paying customers.

If I were an advertiser, I’d rather stick with the old model on the off-chance that some brand lift and a few sales may result from the inflated circulation figures.

Can consumers still be bought? No, and they never could be.

That’s not particularly surprising. Yahoo!, Twitter and Facebook inked deals to include social results within search years ago, and Google responded by building its own social network from scratch.

What’s relevant to brands and agencies is that from an SEO perspective, it foists the need, more than ever, to make content viral-ready. Provided use of Google+ gets widespread enough, that is.

David Droga spoke with Facebook about the role of social media in advertising and the world at large, while Clark Kokich of Razorfish wrote in PSFK about agency evolution.

Some gems that I’m sure will be quoted extensively in due course:

Droga

When an idea is predicated in pre-existing everyday behaviours and communities, then you’re not making something up. You can predict where it’s going to go.

Campaigns that have an ‘ask’…it’s not enough to say ‘like us’ or ‘forward this’…create something that gets better and better the bigger the community gets. Let them take ownership of it.

Our starting point isn’t “What is the creative idea?”

Our starting point is “What is the role (of the brand), why would this message have any relevance to people? Why would we expect people to care about what we’re saying?”

That keeps us honest to every element we do. It’s not “This is a funny ad” or “This is a clever image”. What’s the purpose of it? What’s going to stop it just being dead air? You can’t really fail if you start that way.

(Aside, note how the viewer tried to trap a CD into discussing metrics – and how he sidestepped it.)

Kokich

The biggest challenge facing all agencies…is to do work that matters to the CEO and the board of directors of their clients. CMOs are often not seen as contributing to the growth agenda of the company. There’s a lot of focus on branding, advertising and promotion, but not enough focus on solving real business problems.

What you don’t see enough of is big ideas that drive the business forward, and that have legs – forming the cornerstone of a durable long-term strategy. Too many one-offs, and that has to change or clients will start to think we’re all just goofing around trying out fun new things. It’s a prescription for becoming quickly irrelevant.

Storytelling is still important, but it’s not enough. Don’t talk about things, instead do things that matter to customers…the work ends up looking more like product development than marketing communications.

An established creative director in Singapore decides, after 25 years of advertising life, to set up his own design-focused shop.

Lends a little credence, I suppose, to the theory that creative people join the business because they enjoy the job function and tolerate the industry, whereas account people do so because they enjoy the industry and tolerate the job function.

Solvil et Titus, known for its poignant ads exploring the dynamics of time and love, does it again.

Beautiful narrative, clever watch=clinging on to past love metaphor.

This works as an ad, but could just as well have been a mini film.

Not likely.

Elsewhere, Desperados beer‘s use of social integration to recreate the party experience online is really nifty and the production quality is excellent, but I’m not sure how much more predisposed to the brand it will really make people.

Web strategy is far more about psychology than technology, blogs, Twitter or any other forms of content. The more people use the web to live their lives and do their jobs, the more web professionals need to invest in understanding human behaviour. This is because the web removes the human touch points, the opportunities to observe, the empathy zones. (Gerry McGovern)

Couldn’t agree more with the two theses: that all marketing communication stems from an understanding of the human condition, and that analytics tell us many – but not every – thing(s).

Instead of plumping for (questionable) awareness, they jumped right into engagement. Great way of making their NYC marathon sponsorship really relevant even to the average Joe, and catching the attention of runners.

This says a lot about the state of the ad industry. The self-aggrandising are now shown up for being self-serving too.

(Though I must say Lions for Lions itself sounds like a bid for a pro bono/public service category award.)